Abstract
Transdermal optical wireless (TOW) communication links have recently gained particular research and commercial attention as a viable alternative for establishing high speed and effective implantable data transmissions, which is vital for a variety of neuroprosthetic and other medical applications. However, the development of this optical telemetry modality with medical implanted devices (IMDs) is adversely affected by skin-induced photon absorption, scattering and pointing errors effects. Thus, in this work a minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion is proposed for the estimation of the optical signal intensity in a typical TOW link of varying path loss and misalignment-induced fading characteristics. In this context, the stochastic nature of the transmitter–receiver misalignment has been considered and jointly modeled with transdermal path loss. Additionally, the link is assumed to employ the suitable On–Off Keying (OOK) with intensity modulation and direct detection scheme as well as a PIN photodiode at the receiver side for signal detection. Under these assumptions the results demonstrate that the stochastic amount of pointing mismatch strongly affects the received irradiance estimation.
Highlights
Transdermal optical wireless communication refers to the point-to-point data transfer via light between an in-body and an out-of-body device
Bearing in mind that the feasibility of transdermal optical wireless (TOW) links with On–Off Keying (OOK) has been demonstrated, in this work an estimator based on minimum mean-square error (MMSE) principle has been proposed for the estimation of the in-body received signal intensity for typical TOW link configurations with OOK, PIN-based optical receiver, under the presence of weak-to-extremely-strong stochastic pointing errors
We have first introduced a signal estimator motivated by MMSE principle for a PIN-based in-body receiver TOW link configuration operating with an intensity modulation/direct detection (IM/DD) OOK signaling technique along with the presence of transdermal path losses and stochastic pointing errors
Summary
Transdermal optical wireless communication refers to the point-to-point data transfer via light between an in-body and an out-of-body device. Transdermal optical wireless (TOW) biotelemetry is a very promising alternative to its radiofrequency (RF) and inductive coupling counterparts which are currently used in most implantable communication systems [5,6,7,8] In this regard, TOW technology is a prime candidate especially for bandwidth-hungry medical applications which require high speed and secure transdermal data transfer, including mainly communication with cochlear implants, visual prostheses, recording of neural signal and cortical signal processing [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. For advanced neuroprosthetic applications requiring very high speed and real-time data transmissions in order to achieve natural-feeling prosthetic
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